An entity such as a parent of a child, a haulage company or delivery service, a prison system, or a car rental company, may need to track a location of users or assets, for example but not limited to: ensuring safety, for legal reasons, or in order to secure such assets.
A common method for reporting and storing location data is in a database connected to a network such as are known from US2014074667.
If a location data is recorded in a database maintained by the entity, there are high costs associated with installing and maintaining the hardware and network infrastructure.
If the location is recorded in a facility maintained by a third party such as a data storage provider, then there is a risk that due to network failure or other technical issues the data storage facility will at some times not be available to be queried by the entity, or to be written to by a location aware device to be tracked by the entity. In extreme cases the location data may be irretrievably lost.
Furthermore, if the database is maintained by the third party, there is a risk that the location data may be revealed to other parties, hacked, corrupted, or otherwise altered, without the knowledge of the entity or possibly the third party.
It is the intention of the present invention to address the shortcomings of the prior art, i.e. the problems of establishing and maintaining a network enabled data storage system, ensuring the integrity of the stored data, and providing always-available data access for users of the system. Furthermore, if the method used is based on a distributed system, no individual maintenance costs arise, there is no single point of failure, and through an inherent cryptographic structure integrity is maintained.